Marine rewilding

6.3 Case Study – the UK Solent and New York City

The Solent waterway is one of the most heavily used in the UK with 79,000 shipping movements each year. However, the area is still of high value to nature, with important saltmarsh, seagrass and mudflat habitats, and over 80% of the coastline in this area already designated for nature conservation.

Blue Marine Foundation and their partners, supported by the Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Programme, are working to catalyse seascape scale recovery across the 52,200 ha that make up the Solent (Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme, n.d.).

Read about the Solent seascape restoration on the Endangered Landscapes and Seascapes Programme website.

Restoration in such a heavily used area is challenging, but it isn’t new. Blue Marine Foundation were able to take inspiration from an initiative in the USA that has already been running for 10 years.

Once home to 220,000 acres of oyster reefs, by 1927 the last of the commercial oyster beds in New York City was closed and the population of native oysters had collapsed. The huge increase in pollution entering the city’s harbour along with the incessant harvesting meant that the return of the oyster population would not be possible without active restoration.

In 2014, the Billion Oyster Project (n.d.) set out to achieve the goal of restoring one billion oysters to New York harbour by 2035. By 2000, the water quality in the harbour had returned to a level that was enough for oysters to begin to survive again. 10 years later, over 150 million oysters have been restored and over 20,000 students, volunteers, and community scientists have joined the effort, showing how important education, inspiration and involvement are to a successful rewilding initiative.

Learn more at the Billion Oyster Project.